THE FOOLISHNESS 0

-GOD
April 5, 1992
8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Isaiah 53:1-6
Luke 17:22-25

1 Corinthians 1:18-25

",..God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom,...!"
~l1 Corinthians 1:25 (NRSV)

In the play "Shadowlands" an actor in the role of the late
C. S. Lewis, distinguished scholar, Oxford professor, popular
author and lecturer, walks out onto the dark stage and addresses
the audience:

"Good evening. The Subject of my talk tonight is
love, pain and suffering."

After some clever banter about his being a bachelor and
therefore more acquainted with suffering than love, Lewis says:

"The question I will put to you this evening, and
one which I will attempt to answer is this: If
God loves us, why does He allow us to suffer so
much?"

Lewis refers to the daily paper and a story about a runaway
bus and death of eighteen children. Pointing an accusing finger
upwards he asks:

"Now, where was He? Why didn't He Stop it? What
Possible point can there be to such a tragedy?
Isn't God Supposed to be good? Isn't God supposed
to love us?"

well in the world and to make us lovable and loving. "Pain is
God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world," he Says, and it is al}

But then Lewis falls in love. or more accurately, a love
which he didn't know was there, is called out of him by a woman,
an American divorcee, Joy Davidson. They become friends. She
and her son move to England after her marriage breaks up and as
their friendship grows, Lewis agrees to marry her in order to
Satisfy immigration requirements, athough they remain just
friends, very properly so.

And then suddenly Joy becomes gravely ill. She is going to
die and Lewis discovers two things: one, he cares about her very
much; and two, he is now vulnerable to an intensely personal,
intensely painful suffering, which before Joy he knew only intel-
lectually. so he marries her again, truly this time, in the
hospital. Her illness subsides for a while. They have a bit of

wonderful time together. ana then she becomes il] again and
dies. ,

Near the end of the play it is a very different Cc. S. Lewis.
A clergy friend tries to comfort him.

"We have to have faith that God knows."
Lewis responds in the rawness of grief and anger:

"God knows, ¥es, God knows. [I don't doubt that.
But does God care? Did God care about Joy?"
(Shadowlands, William Nicholson}

It is important, I believe, to ask difficult questions in
church, to think about difficult things together here. On this
day - which in the long history of the Christian Church used to
be known as Passion Sunday, nearing the end of Lent, two weeks
before Easter -— it is important to think about the central notion
of our faith. Namely, that Jesus of Nazareth, who we believe was
God's son, God's Christ, God's Incarnation, suffered, and died,
and further that his suffering and dying were and are meaningful;
were more than a tragedy, more than a terrible injustice; that
his suffering and dying contain somehow God's love and God's
Power to make a difference in your life and mine.

Life is full of enough grimness and suffering and tragedy.
Religion ought to afford a respite, not more of the same. At
-- least. we're consistent. - Tf there.is one consistant dynamic in
~+ the New Testament it is Jesus! prediction of his own suffering
and death and his disciples' absolute refusal to deal with it or
even think about it. They are willing to accept and believe what
he says - up to this. They agree with what he Says about the
Kingdom of God, loving your enemies and forgiving seventy times
Seven. But they don't want to hear about suffering and death.
"God forbid," Peter Said about it.

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SO we are consistent about this matter. And yet
the questions raised by suffering and death - his or anybody's
for that matter - will not go away. My guess is that you ask
them, momentarily at least, every time you read the newspaper -
the morning summary of unnecessary suffering and tragedy -
a dear little Theresa Ann Campo Pearson, born without a fully
formed brain and the capacity for life, parents and grandparents
standing around watching; a plane crash, an unexpected malignan-
cy, one more AIDS death, twenty more people killed in the death

throes of apartheid... And for a moment at least, until our
propensity for self-protection moves us on to the sports page, we
ask, every morning, over our second cup of coffee, "Why? Why,

God? Is this really necessary?"

The philosophers have known that the greatest single argu-
ment against the existence of God is the existence of evil. And
human beings have been thinking about it and struggling with it
from the beginning of time.

The story of Job is the poetic expression of the question,
"Why do innocent people suffer?" The accepted belief of the day
was that innocent people do not suffer. Because God is just,
suffering is the punishment for sin.

Job won't agree to that, and so, remarkably, in the Bible
itself, is an eloquent struggle between a man and his conscience
and his God around this matter of innocent suffering.

Archibald MacLeish framed the question and the Job story in
a’ contemporary setting in the Pulitzer prize-winning play, "J.B."
In that drama, Satan ana@ God, two aging circus vendors, are
discussing the old dilemma and Satan, or Nickles, says:

"If God is God He is not good,
If God is good He is not God."

That's the issue isn't it? How can a God who is good cause,
or allow to happen, so many things that are not good? In his
best selling memoir, Growing Up, Russell Baker tells about learn-
ing, at the age of five, that his father had just died. He wrote:

"That day I decided that God was not entirely to
be trusted. After that I never cried again with
any real conviction, nor expected much of any-
one's God except indifference, nor loved deeply
without fear that it would cost me deeply in

pain." [Growing Up, p. 61-62]

There it is again - the connection between love and suffer-
ing. The traditional explanation falls apart for Job when it is
his family, his life, his love. c. S. Lewis can deliver learned

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lectures on pain and suffering until he loves and the person he
loves dies and then even he is Speechless. Russell Baker, with
amazing candor, confesses that to love deeply is to know the
reality of suffering.

There are, of course, ways to talk about it. Some suffering
occurs because of human error, misjudgment, wrongdoing, sin - if
you will. put enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and you
will burn a hole in the ozone, the whole place will warm up and
people will die of skin cancer. Breathe enough smoke and tar and
nicotine into your system and there is a very good chance that
you will become very sick and die. Everybody knows that.

So some Suffering occurs because of human error and greed
and sin. But some just happens because we are part of creation.
Some suffering happens because we are free,

God has created us to live in peace and justice and love.
But, the theologians teac , if we are free to love and seek
peace, we are also free not to love and to make war. God can't
predetermine it, or stack the deck, or even intervene in the
process without violating our freedom our humanness.

Parents understand that. You don't want your child to
suffer ever. you want to do everything possible to protect your
child from random accidents, sadness, tragedy.

But there comes a day when your child must walk out of the
house and go to School, or cross a street alone, or drive the
Car. And on those days your love, because it is love, is willing
to risk tragedy for the Sake of your child's freedom and growth
and humanness,

Does God cause suffering? of course not! The notion is
appalling. Does Gog allow suffering? In the same way that your
mother and father exposed you to the risk of accidental tragedy
when you first rode a bicycle or drove the family car, yes.

Does God care? Did your parents care? of course, Made~
leine L'Engle said Somewhere that parents are only ever as happy
as their least happy child. of course God cares - that's the
point. God cares enough to love us into existence, to love us
into life, to give us freedom to love life deeply and passionate-
ly. God cares enough to stand with us and over us as we live
our lives, good days and bad, joys and Sorrows, triumphs and
tragedies in the Same way that the love of a good parent is
always with the child.

In fact, the Paradox, the mystery of the cross, is that God
suffers too,

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Frederick Buechner wrote beautifully about Goa granting us
freedom and not intervening in our lives to protect us from
tragedy because that would mean violating our freedom. [The
Faces of Jesus, p. 54 ff.] And then for him, too, that neat
abstraction became a terrible reality as his beloved daughter
became gravely ill. Anorexia -.and Buechner more than anything
wanted to protect her and make her well. In his book, Teiling
Secrets, he writes:

"The only way I knew to be a father was to take
care of her, to move heaven and earth to make her
well. The psychiatrists we consulted told me I
couldn't cure her. The best I could do as her
father was to Stand back and give her (that)
freedom even at the risk of her using it to choose
for death instead of life." [p. 26-27]

And So that is what he did, loved her enough not to violate
her freedom, and Suffered with her ang for her.

St. Paul was right.

It's foolishness finally and weakness. The foolishness and
weakness of God who loves so much as to become vulnerable for us,
loves us enough to be subject to the same random suffering, the
Same unpredictable and unjust tragedy, as anyone of us. God
being God, didn't have to do that, didn't have to offer up a son
and die in the way only a parent dies at the death of a beloved
child.

It's a foolishness which turns out to be better than our
best wisdom, St. Paul wrote, as he too, exhausted all the theo-
logical ways to describe it.

And c. s, Lewis, just three years before he died, wrote so
beautifully in a way I now conclude was not only about himself -
but about God.

"To love at all is to be vulnerable, Love any-
thing and your heart will certainly be wrung and
Possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of
keeping it intact you will give it to no one, not
even to an animal. Wrap it carefully with lux-
uries, avoid all entanglements, lock it up in the
coffin of your selfishness... it will not be
broken: it will become unbreakable, The only
place outside Heaven where you can be safe from
all the dangers of love is Hell." [Ihe Four Loves,
C. S. Lewis, p. 111-112] .

The foolishness of God: a cross, suffering and death, the
promise of love, the gift of love, the power of love.

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On the day I got up early to prepare this sermon I headed
out at noon, drove route 65 to Lafayette, Indiana, for the funer-
al of a frieng. He had retired early, was as happy as he knew
how to be, his sons raised and on their Own, mortgage paid,
healthy grandchildren. Six weeks ago he was doing what he loved
most in the world — next to God and his family - Standing knee
deep in the Gulf fishing. Monday he died.

No one can explain it. the Physicians can Say what they
know. We can all gather around his wife and family ~ as we did -
ultimately without words to say, except for these:

God did not will his death. God's heart breaks
along with our hearts. Gog has loved deeply and
felt deeply the pain and the grief which come to
each of us. Ged knows. God cares.

And the cross Which stands for the anguish of God and also
for the relentless presence of innocent, suffering. and -injustinc
in life, also Stands for Something else - namely God's love and
the promise that no matter what happens to us, in that love, we

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